


at the end of your rope i'll be holding you taut

by procellous



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (no not those metaphors. get your mind out of the gutter.), Crying, Dancing, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Fluff, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Metaphors about Spring, Theon and Brienne are BFFs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 15:42:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20677832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procellous/pseuds/procellous
Summary: Sansa can't sleep; Theon helps.





	at the end of your rope i'll be holding you taut

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, Magic 8-ball, will I ever write something that's not set in the middle of the night? 
> 
> Signs point to no.

Theon woke with a start, his breath coming shallow and his heart beating fast. If he’d had a nightmare, he couldn’t remember it, but something was wrong; something was missing. 

It took him a moment to wake up enough to piece together what was wrong. He was in Winterfell, and he was safe—the weight of warmth on him, almost too-hot, were furs and quilts, because he got cold easily and Sansa worried. Ramsay was dead, and Reek with him; Theon Greyjoy was alive, bloodied but unbowed. 

He reached out for Sansa, but his hand found only cold sheets and an empty bed. That was what was so wrong: he should have been waking beside his queen and wife. 

He resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose in exasperation. They had talked about this when it was his nightmares keeping him from rest, when he would wake in the middle of the night with the memory of blood on his hands; more than once he had scrubbed his palms raw in the middle of the night, desperate to get it off. 

How like Sansa to offer comfort—to insist on it, even—but to never seek it for herself. 

No matter, though; if anyone could convince her to come back to bed and sleep, it would be him—or Brienne, of course, but he didn’t fancy the thought of waking the Lady Commander of the Winter’s Guard at this hour of the night, not unless there was an army at the gates. Besides, she would give him a terribly _knowing_ look when he revealed that he was sharing a bed with their officially-unmarried queen. Never mind that she already knew about that anyway, after an alarming incident in which they both mistook each other for assassins and Sansa laughed for weeks afterwards about it—no, she would be so smug just getting him to admit that he and Sansa were sharing a bed. 

(If he and Sansa had said vows before the heart tree, with Yara and Arya to witness, and if Yara had poured salt water over their heads as they sealed the vows with a kiss—well, that was no-one’s business but their own, and particularly not the business of any nosy lady knights with knowing looks.)

He pulled on his boots, not bothering to get fully dressed, and took two furs from the rack. Wherever Sansa had gone, it couldn’t possibly be warmer than the bed that she had left. 

Sansa wandered through the corridors, feeling like one of the ghosts of Winterfell. She had left Theon asleep in their bed, warm under the covers; she had thought about waking him, but he needed his rest. Besides, there was little comfort he could offer her for these dreams. 

The stone was cold under her feet. Her toes were beginning to sting, her thin slippers meant for her warm chambers and not icy corridors, but it was distant and easily ignored. The wind howled around the walls with a sound like distant sobs and screams. Her back prickled and ached with the memory of armored fists and the flats of swords as the cold picked at her scars. 

She had paid for Winterfell with her body and blood, and found it silent and cold and dark, as though it mourned for its lost children. Even now it mourned. 

Her footsteps were quiet on the stone as she stepped out into the night. 

The gardens were dead, of course. The glass was long-gone, and the snow stripped the stems and stalks of every leaf and petal. It felt appropriate, really: she had loved the gardens in her youth, dancing among the flowers, and now it was all dead and cold and she was not a child. She couldn’t remember the last time she had danced…

Her dream crept in at the edges of her vision: Winterfell in eternal summer, shining and bright, each blade of grass emerald-green and each spear of sunlight golden-bright, so real that they could cut her to the bone. 

Someone crunched through the snow. She didn’t flinch or startle at the sound; she knew that shuffling tread like she knew her own. 

“Here you are,” Theon said, settling a fur cloak over her shoulders. “I was worried.”

“Here I am,” she agreed, softly. “I didn’t mean to wake you.” A sharp point of guilt worked its way into her gut. She hated worrying her husband. 

His hand carded through her unbound hair, gentle as he brought their foreheads together, his hand cradling the back of her head. She returned the gesture, his soft hair curling around her fingers.

“I wish you’d wake me for your nightmares,” he said. 

“You needed your sleep. And it wasn’t a nightmare.” She watched her fingers curl into the thick fur around Theon’s shoulders like spiders, pale against the dark; like a plant grown below stone, strange and starved. How long had it been since she had known the warmth of sunlight on her skin? 

“Sansa,” Theon began, but she cut him off with a shake of her head. 

“It _wasn’t_. I was happy. And when I woke up, for a moment, I was still happy. And then I realized it was nothing but a dream.” The tears came then, stinging in her eyes and sliding down her cheeks to die in bursts of salt on her lips. 

“They were alive, weren’t they?” It wasn’t really a question; she had woken often enough to his soft sobs in the night to know that he had the same dreams that she did; the same nightmares, too—or rather, nightmare, singular. Just one long nightmare that they sometimes woke up from. 

Fate was monstrous and strange; when they were all alive and happy, they had nothing in common, and now they had everything in common—shared grief, shared scars, shared nightmares. It was a terrible price to pay for trust, but it always was, wasn’t it? If she could, would she trade this trust, this fluttering budding thing that was almost love, for her siblings to live? Would she trade these quiet touches in the dark, this steady warmth in the night, for Winterfell to stand whole and unbroken in the sunlight?

Would he?

“I was so happy. We all were. We were married before the whole of the North, and I was Robb’s Hand, and it was all so perfect that when I woke up, just for a moment I thought it might be true.” She laughed, but the sound was choked with tears and broken. “We danced together. I don’t think I’ve danced since I was a child.”

One of his hands rested on the small of her back, the other cupping her cheek, both warm and real as a hearth-fire. “I can’t bring back your family, and I can’t bring back the summer, as much as I wish I could. But as for dancing…”

He stepped back, letting go of her, and she felt colder for the memory of his warmth. He bowed low, with the kind of flourishes she might have expected of a courtier in King’s Landing, and offered his hand. 

“My lady wife, might I have this dance?” he asked, grinning broadly—one corner of it still pulled higher than the other, even after everything—with a steady affection in his eyes, the one she had seen in his eyes when he had asked to fight for Winterfell. 

Sansa felt her knees melting at the sight of it. This was what it was, this was what the songs had promised. The monster slain, the prisoners freed, the happily ever after that she had feared once might be impossible. 

She laughed, bright and free, as she hadn’t in years. The unfamiliarity made her cheeks and ribs ache, but she couldn’t stop, didn’t dare to. 

“My lord husband,” she said, taking his hand, “you may.”

They had no music as they spun around the bare gardens, except perhaps they did—a song too high and deep for words, as the wind blew through the trees like fingers on harp-strings and howled around the stones; a song that curled around them like the embrace of ghosts. 

She closed her eyes, leaning into Theon’s embrace; her feet knew the steps better than she did. She rested her head in the crook of his neck, and let the dream take hold. There were flowers blooming around them, crawling up arbors and dangling from trellises and lining the paths, like in her imaginings of Highgarden, but the flowers were winter roses and forget-me-nots and northern geraniums, iris and lupine and bluebells; the flowers of the North. Perhaps it was not a dream at all.

The thought of spring didn’t ache in Theon’s arms, warm and strong and safe. Winter had come but winter would pass; it was a dark night but the night would end. Day would come again, light and warmth with it, and they would put Winterfell together again. Stone by stone, seed by seed, scar by scar: it would take years, but the gardens would bloom again, and they would be there to see the dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> and then they both caught colds after dancing around in the snow in the middle of the night in their pajamas, and Brienne was very exasperated at them for at least a month. The end.


End file.
